What will educators focus on in 2006? Which educational technology trends deserve more attention than others? What “will likely have enduring impact on the university campus beyond the current hype?” For the answer to these questions, and more, see "“Bytes From Lev,” a blog from Lev Gonick, vice president for Information Services and chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In particular, Lev’s December 27, 2005 post titled “The View from the University Campus: The Top 10 Technology Stories of 2005,” is an interesting piece that helps to answer such questions.

Educational Pathways recently interviewed Lev to further expand on his “Top 10” musings. In addition to getting Lev’s point of view, we added a few of our own and compressed it all into seven things to watch in 2006 and beyond.

Number 7 - Disaster Recovery
The message here is let’s build a “robust, scalable, financially responsible plan” for maintaining data security and business continuation, so colleges and universities can protect their business interests and jointly provide alternative education solutions for the possibility of any kind of disaster striking. Last year’s slew of natural disasters, as well as the SARS epidemic in 2003, have all brought this issue to the forefront. The relatively recent “Sloan Semester,” sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by the Sloan Consortium and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), is great example of an initiative that was built up in record time, on the fly, to quickly come to the aid of hurricane-impacted students in the Golf Coast region. The question now becomes how does higher education build a national disaster recovery system for the possibility of any kind of small or large disaster that may occur down the road.

Number 6 - Mergers and Acquisitions
Lev does not have any warm and fuzzy feelings about Oracle acquiring PeopleSoft or the Blackboard/WebCT merger. “I think we will not be satisfied with the way Oracle takes care of higher education for the simple reason that it (higher education) provides only one percent of the revenues for this huge, global corporation,” Lev explains. He proposes that rather than “waiting to be disappointed, we (the higher education information technology community), should aggressively be looking to create an open source student information system (SIS) alternative.” Although nothing of a serious nature in this area has yet to materialize, Lev believes that a viable open-source effort could possibly get picked up by a company like SAP, which, in turn, would provide more incentive for Oracle to become more innovative in the higher education SIS world. Regarding Blackboard and WebCT, Lev says in his blog that “there has long been a sense that we can do better than the current incumbent providers in the course management world.” Why? Because, as noted in our interview with Lev, “deep learning does not take place as a result of these course management systems. Their popularity, in the main, is around organizational and management issues. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is certainly not contributing to the learning we are getting much closer to.”

Number 5 - The New Information and Media Literacy of the 21st Century
Lev explains that there is “an arc of activity within higher education that appears ready for prime time.” This activity is being driven by a “combination of technological and teacher/learner readiness” to adopt “multi-sensory education.” In support of this notion, he points to the New Media Consortium’s 21st Century Literacy Initiative and its publishing of “A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Literacy Summit,” which was based on a meeting of a group of authors, researchers, policy makers, educators and artists who gathered in San Jose, California in April 2005. In brief, this group came to the conclusion that “researchers and educators are realizing that the current models of education are failing us,” primarily because today’s youth have a different set of aural and visual skills and abilities that are not being engaged.

“New literacy requirements of the 21st Century are extraordinarily powerful because they provide young people a chance to express themselves and become authors in ways that have not been so obvious and apparent in the past,” says Lev. “They tell stories with visual tools in a much more intuitive way (than the way us older generation types learned to write, for instance).

For more on this topic, see Lev’s recent piece in the EDUCAUSE Review’s January/February issue, titled “New Media and Literacy in the 21st Century.”

Number 4 - A New Generation Optical Network
What Lev refers to as “Internet 3” is being built by scientists and educators in physics, electrical engineering, computer science, the field of advanced visualization, etc. Lev explains that “we are facing this generation’s Sputnik” through the evolution of “Dense Wave Division Multiplexing” (DWDM). DWDM is the technology that is enabling scientists to increase the current standard of carrying one large network over a single piece of fiber (Internet 2) to newer increasing levels as large as 16 to 32 separate networks over this very same fiber. To put this into very simple laymen’s terms, it’s all done by shooting beams of light down the fiber. “The point is that the same infrastructure can be used to meet the needs of not only commodity users, but also the research community,” says Lev, adding that the U.S. research community can reassert its global competitiveness by leading this Internet 3 charge. “It is a sleeper issue right now that probably will not come to the forefront until we get an actual merged organization (of leading U.S. scientists and educators in the field). But it is something worth watching.”

Number 3 - Google
The short version of Lev’s posting related to Google is that Google Scholar is redefining the way we conduct research,
and Google Earth is redefining the way we use Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Google Scholar “has helped to render more vulnerable two of the great and enduring myths of the Academy,” writes Lev. “The role of the traditional librarian, and, in particular, the traditional bibliographer, is now under more stress than every before. Innovative librarians are taking an Asian philosophy and are using tools like RSS feeds, disciplinary blogs and other tools to help harvest the avalanche of information and data to support their faculty and student customers. The other challenge occasioned by Google Scholar is the continuing usurpation of the traditional role of the faculty instructor in the classroom.”

Google Earth is “more than a tool for finding the closest pizza store,” says Lev. “Whether your interests are local, regional, national, international, contemporary, historical, or related to just about any discipline, there are countless opportunities to leverage Google Earth. The very first communities of practice are beginning to surface. My favorite two are the National Geographic community and the UNESCO World Heritage communities of practice. The spread of disease, the migration of peoples, the penetration of new or old technologies, levels of education, poverty, arms races, ecological degradation, public health, economic health, and education can be all mapped down to the smallest geographic unit of analysis.”

Number 2 - Disruptive Open Source Software
OpenOffice is “poised to disrupt the university marketplace and challenge Microsoft’s stranglehold on the office productivity tool set,” writes Lev. Other interesting open source products worth noting are Flickr, for storing and sharing photos; voo2do, for task and priority management; and del.icio.us, for collecting, indexing and sharing all of your favorite electronic resources and collections. Lev says this is all related to a movement coined “Web 2.0,” which is based on the open document format (ODF). He adds that “a lot of folks in the European public sector are using OpenOffice. There are RFPs in Europe that require the use of ODF, and the preferred standard in Europe is OpenOffice.” Lev’s main point about OpenOffice, as well as the aforementioned “social computing” tools, is that they “represent an important in-road to the college campus, not only because they are free, but because they are built around these new Web 2.0 standards.”

Number 1 - Where is the Next Generation of Leading Philanthropists?
“Our generation has not yet surfaced its own Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sloan, Ford, Packard, Lilly, Johnson, Kellogg, Pew, MacArthur, Mellon, Annenberg, or Woodruff,” Lev writes. In our interview with Lev, he adds that, in the 20th Century, such philanthropists “saw higher education as a critical and strategic institutional investment to transform the lives of Americans and to transform America’s role in the world. In the 21st Century it appears that thus far there is no comparable foundation.” While the generosity on the world front from leaders such as Paul Allen and Bill Gates is enormously important, “they don’t appear to see the importance of higher education.” Instead, today’s leading philanthropists believe that technology can be delivered directly to all Americans who can, “without the intervening value of universities and research institutions, gain value. The number one issue for me is trying to find a way to reassert the relevance of higher education in the 21st Century. It is a very important issue that is worth pointing out.”

Related Websites:

Bytes from Lev
http://blog.case.edu/lsg8/2005/12/27/the_view_from_the_university_campus_the_top_10_technology_stories_of_2005

“A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Literacy Summit”
http://www.nmc.org/projects/literacy/index.shtml

Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/

“New Media and Literacy in the 21st Century”
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm061.asp

National Geographic Data Layers
http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/115465/an/0/page/0#115465

UNESCO World Heritage Centre
http://whc.unesco.org/en/map/

OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/

voo2do
http://voo2do.com/

del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/

Web 2.0
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html